Harry Turtledove - Tale of the Fox

She set the tarred-leather drinking jacks on the table very slowly and carefully, as if they were cut rock crystal that might shatter at a touch. Gerin felt as if he might shatter at a touch, too.

"Here, what's this?" the villager said. "The two of you know each other? How in the five hells do you know each other?"

"We manage," Gerin said, his voice still ragged. Dagref's eyes were wide as rounds of flatbread.

"Aye, we do." Elise sounded as much taken aback as the Fox did. Turning to him, she said, "I didn't know your face. I didn't know who you were till I heard you speak."

"Nor I you," he answered. He scratched at his beard. He knew how gray it was. "It's been a long, long time."

"Yes." She looked from him to Dagref and back again. Slowly, some small question in her voice, she said, "Surely this isn't Duren. He would be older."

"You're right." Gerin nodded. "This is Dagref, my older son by Selatre, my wife since a few years after you… you left. Did you know that Duren is lord of the holding that belonged to your father?"

Elise shook her head, which meant she was hearing of the death of her father, Ricolf the Red, for the first time. "No. I didn't know," she answered. "News moves slowly, when it moves at all. How long-? How-?"

"Five years ago now," the Fox answered. "A fit of apoplexy. From everything I heard, it was as easy as such things can be. Duren has the holding firmly in his hands these days."

"Does he?" Elise still looked dazed. She had plenty to be dazed about. Gerin was feeling dazed, too. He also felt as if he'd tumbled twenty years back through time, into a part of his life long closed off from that in which he was living now and had been since he'd found Selatre.

The villager who'd come into the tavern with Gerin and Dagref gulped his ale. "Well, I'd best be off," he said, and got up from his stool and hurried out into the sunset.

Dagref, by contrast, stared in fascination from Gerin to Elise and back again. The Fox thought his son's ears curled forward to hear the better, but that might have been his imagination. He hoped it was. Quietly, he said, "Son, why don't you take the sheep back to the camp, so they're sacrificed before the sun goes down?"

"But-" Dagref began. He stopped, then tried again: "But I want to-" Then he realized that what Gerin had phrased as a polite request was in fact an order, and one that brooked no contradiction. The glare Gerin sent his way helped him realize that. Regretfully, resentfully, sulkily, and very, very slowly, he did as his father bade him.

Elise's laugh was nervous. "He wanted to hear everything," she said.

"Of course he did," Gerin said. "And once he'd heard it, he'd know it all, and be able to give back any piece of it you wanted, as near word for word as makes no difference. He'd even understand most of it."

"He takes after you," Elise murmured. By her tone, she didn't altogether intend that as a compliment.

Gerin started to get angry. Before he let the anger show, he saw that half of it-maybe more than half of it… no, certainly more than half of it-was all the things he hadn't been able to say since she'd disappeared, now trying to crawl out of his throat at once. With an effort, he crammed them back. "How have you been?" he asked, a question that seemed unlikely to throw oil on the fire.

"How do I look?" she answered. Everything she said seemed to have a bitter edge to it.

"As if you've seen hard times," Gerin said.

She laughed again. "What do you know of hard times? You've always been a baron in a keep, or a prince, or a king. Your belly's been full. People do what you tell them to do. Even your son does what you tell him to do."

"And who says the gods no longer give us as many miracles as we'd like?" Gerin said. Once, a long time before, his sarcasm had amused her. Now she just tossed her head, waiting for him to say something of consequence. Holding back the anger was harder. With an edge in his own voice, he said, "I'm sorry it's been hard for you. It didn't have to be, you know. You could-"

"Could what?" Elise broke in. "Could have stayed? That would have been harder yet. Why do you think I left?"

"My best guess always was that you left because you got bored and wanted something new and didn't much care what it was," Gerin answered. "As long as it was new, that would suit you."

"You were the prince of the north," Elise said. "You were having a fine time being the prince of the north-such a fine time, you forgot all about me. I was good enough for a brood mare, and that was that."

One side of Gerin's mouth twisted in what was not a smile. "I needed to do everything I did, you know. If I hadn't done what I did, odds are neither one of us would be here hashing this out now. The Trokmoi would have swallowed up a lot more land than they did."

"That's likely so." Elise nodded. "I never said you weren't good at what you did. I just said you paid more attention to it than you did to me-except when you wanted to take me to bed, of course. And you didn't pay all that much attention to me then."

"Not fair," he said. He hadn't seen her for twenty years, and yet she knew how to get under his skin as if they'd never been apart. "I never looked anywhere else. I never wanted to look anywhere else."

"Of course not," Elise said. "Why would you? I was handy. `Come here, Elise. Take off your skirt.`"

"It wasn't like that," Gerin insisted.

"Oh, but it was," she said.

They glared at each other. Gerin was convinced he remembered things just as they'd been. Elise, obviously, was as convinced her memory was straight and his crooked. He had no records, not for something like that. He sighed. "It's done. It's over. You made sure it would be over. Have you been happier since than you would have been if you'd stayed with me? I hope so, for your sake."

"Decent of you to say so, though talk is cheap. I've seen how cheap talk is, over the years." She pursed her lips. "Have I been happier than I would have been if I'd stayed behind? Every once in a while, much happier. All together? I doubt it."

The answer held a certain bleak honesty. Gerin sighed again. He was tempted to walk out, walk back to the encampment, and spend the rest of his life pretending he'd never run into the woman who'd borne his oldest son. But that thought brought up another one, one he needed to ask about for Duren's sake: "Do you have any other children?"

"I had two, both girls," she answered, and then looked down at the ground. "Neither one of them lived to be two years old."

"I'm sorry," Gerin said.

"So am I," she said, even more bleakly than before. When she raised her head once more, unshed tears glittered in her eyes. "You know you take a chance loving them, but you can't help it."

"No, you can't," Gerin said. "I've had three since who lived. We lost one."

"You've been lucky," Elise said soberly. She studied him for a moment, then repeated herself in a different tone of voice: "You've been lucky."

"Yes, of course I have," he replied. "I've been steady, too."

He could see she didn't understand what he was talking about. When he'd known her, she'd been ready to turn her world upside down at a moment's notice. That was how the two of them had come together. He doubted she'd changed much since. That made her steady, in an unsteady way.

"You've been lucky," she said yet again. "You sound as if you were even lucky enough to find a woman whose temper matches yours. I didn't think there was any such creature."

"You threw me aside," he said. "Of course you wouldn't think anyone else might want me."

"That's not-" Elise paused. She was relentlessly honest. "Well, maybe it is true, but not all true."

"However you like." Gerin shrugged. He could feel how tight a grip he had on his temper. It struggled and writhed in that grip, too, the way Van did when they wrestled together. As the Fox did with Van, he felt it liable to escape at any moment. To try to hold it in check, he asked, "Did you find a man who matched your temper?"